


The Season Of Return.

by Jackmerlin



Category: The Marlows - Antonia Forest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-17 21:01:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29106762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jackmerlin/pseuds/Jackmerlin
Summary: A few years have passed and Esther does put up that ad in the local shop. The person who calls wanting a gardener is Lois Sanger.
Comments: 17
Kudos: 23





	1. Winter.

**Author's Note:**

> This was a prompt several years ago now for a Forest ficfest. The seed of the story stuck in my mind, but it has been some recent Facebook discussions that started to shape which way the story was going to grow.  
> The story is set in the modern day, possibly a year or two ago - pre covid anyway. I have gone on from the RAH timeline, so the characters were all at school in the early/mid-eighties and are now middle-aged.

There wasn’t, in truth, all that much to do in the garden at this time of year, but the executor of the old lady’s will had agreed to carry on paying out of the estate for Esther to keep on ‘popping in’ once a week until the house sale had completed. It was to keep an eye on the house as much as anything. The ‘Sold’ sign had been hanging at the front of the house all autumn, increasingly faded and battered, until the strong winds they’d had before Christmas finally ripped it loose. The estate agents hadn’t replaced it.  
The long narrow garden backed onto the park, hidden from sight but not from sound by a high wooden fence. Every autumn the line of chestnut trees that marked the boundary jettisoned their load of dead leaves into the gardens along the street. Esther raked up the last few clumps that had been abandoned by wind and rain in odd corners, picked up the inevitable can and crisp packet that got blown - or tossed - over the fence, and dug the leaves into the neat compost heap.  
The first bulbs were pushing their green shafts out of the wintry earth, and she noted a few darts of colour - the crocus were already coming out. Esther felt a pang for the old lady who wasn’t going to see them this year, nor - her favourites later on - the daffodils, nor the chestnuts blazing with candles in early summer. She’d been looking after Mrs Smith’s garden for eighteen years now; it had been the first job she’d taken on when Seb had started his two hours a morning at playschool.  
She could have returned to her gardening work sooner. Robert had been all for getting a nanny - they _could_ afford it, as he never ceased to point out, but she had demurred. She hadn’t been able to explain the fierce possessive need she felt to do everything for her child herself - a feeling which Rob so evidently didn’t share - and she certainly couldn’t tell him about the ridiculous conviction which had seized her after dear Daks had passed away. Seb had only been six weeks old, and Daks at sixteen a very elderly dog. It had seemed to her that Daks must have deliberately hung on till then just to be sure that she had someone else to fill his place - which _of course_ was nonsense - anyone _sensible_ would tell her so - but all the _same …_. So for nearly three years she hadn’t gardened at all, except the window boxes on the balcony of their apartment, which she tended while Seb had his nap, and which had bloomed all summer long, the envy of the neighbours and the people opposite. She realised later that her absorption with Seb and his constant infant needs had made it easier for Rob to have the first affair, the beginning of a long line which led eventually to the seemingly inevitable divorce.  
She moved over the empty beds, plucking out persistent weeds, which, hardy and quick to take advantage, were colonising the bare spaces around the shrubs. Deep in the layers of her fleece, her phone pinged. Straightening up stiffly, she rummaged for the zip of the inner pocket; expecting that it would be a text from Seb confirming his trip home this weekend, along with the usual bags of laundry. It wasn’t; it was her friend Pauline, messaging their choir Whatsapp group; ‘Sorry ladies, can’t make it tonight, still got this stupid throat’. She felt a mild twitch of disappointment; choir practice was always more fun with Pauline’s effervescent presence.  
Since the old lady’s death, Esther had brought a supply of sunflower seed to fill the bird feeders that hung within view of the downstairs sitting room. Mrs Smith had always enjoyed watching the birds. Esther didn’t like to think of them coming and finding nothing, then gradually giving up bothering to come and look. Today she had brought extra fat balls because the forecast had threatened freezing weather, maybe even snow.  
She was just finishing up, sweeping wind-blown debris from around the patio pots when she was startled by a shadow moving behind the french windows.  
She realised several things in quick succession. There was a man in the house, he had seen her through the glass and he was reaching towards the door. Then she saw that he was staring at her with the same mix of alarm, fear and suspicion that she was feeling. After a moment of mutual embarrassment in which they both stammered at each other, and it gradually dawned on them both that the other was not an illicit intruder, the man managed to assert himself - “Sorry, I’d forgotten the estate agent did say about the garden. I don’t suppose they let you know yet. We only signed the papers yesterday.”  
“Oh, I see. I’ll just - “ Esther indicated her small pile of sweepings. He was a middle-aged, middle height, slightly crumpled-looking man, with an apologetic air.  
“Yes, of course. No hurry. The garden looks very well kept, I must say. It’s partly what sold me on the house actually, having a bit of green space. We’ve been out in Dubai for years, you see, and Hong Kong before that, working in English schools, so we never had the chance of a garden. A few houseplants in the flat if we were lucky, but we didn’t even have to water them ourselves!”  
He followed Esther to the compost heap where she tipped out her pan of sweepings. Esther, who could talk without her usual shyness when it was about gardening, pointed out various plants, and indicated what was about to come up in the empty beds, which bush or climbing plant would bloom in which month. He said ‘ah’ or ‘I see’ from time to time, but with an air of not really paying attention. Finally, as they stood at the far end of the garden, looking back up at the house, he said, with a faint trace of anxiety, “And you let yourself in through that side gate, do you?”  
“Yes, there’s a padlock but I have the key - oh, I should give it to you now, shouldn’t I?” She dug into the safe pocket in which her bundle of client’s keys was kept, and started threading the right one off the ring. Feeling unusually clumsy, it took her a couple of attempts to finally slide it free.  
In relief at having got what he wanted without having to ask point-blank, he became over friendly and garrulous. “Maybe you could leave your number - just in case - though I’m probably going to manage the garden myself - I am going to be around most of the time anyway. The grand plan is for me to have foreign language students as lodgers and teach them English - enough to keep me out of mischief anyway, haha - but I’ll have time to potter round here while they do their sight-seeing and such …”  
She handed him the key. “Ah, thank you. It’s a lovely big house, isn’t it? It’s lucky - we were just starting to look when it came on the market. There’s not many round here that haven’t been converted into flats already.”  
“It was Mrs Smith’s home for over fifty years, I believe,” said Esther gently.  
“Ah, yes. It’s still got all the period details untouched. Wonderful. Although we’re going to have to make a few changes. We’re going to make part of the ground floor into a bedsit for Lois’s mother - my mother-in-law, that is. Sorry, I should have said, I’m Michael.”  
“Esther,” said Esther politely, and shook the proffered hand. It was her turn to not really listen, as he carried on talking. She didn’t want to listen to him going on about his wife’s plans to teach yoga and pilates - no, she murmured politely, when he asked, she’d never done either. She was looking at the fig tree, at the archway she’d trained the wisteria over, the pruned, bare shape of her favourite rose bush that in summer produced the most perfect pearl coloured blooms …  
“This should flower soon,” she said, interrupting his flow, touching a tightly furled bud on the camellia. What she would have liked to say, but _couldn’t,_ was ‘look after this, look after the garden, please take care of it …’  
There should have been a sense of farewell in her final visit to the garden, she thought, not this man with his spaniel eyes anxiously trying to herd her away.  
Like saying goodbye to a friend, she’d expected the last time to be somehow formal, with time to reflect, maybe a moment to rest her hand on a tree trunk, to feel the memory of the garden in her bones, the whispers of every twig and leaf. Though saying goodbye to a friend could be just as sudden, raw and unexpected. She hadn’t known she was going to stop being friends with Nicola that winter afternoon in the school garden.

Where on earth had _that_ thought come from? Out of the blue like that? She had said goodbye, gathered her tools and left along the narrow side-passage; the unexpected haste leaving her with a vague sense of being bound to have forgotten something. Not till she’d walked along the street, past the Resident Only parking spaces, to the spot where she’d been lucky to leave her car earlier, did she stop and _think._  
It must have been the name Lois. An unusual name, she probably hadn’t heard it since school. Except for Lois Lane of course. Rob had had something of a weakness for Superman and other comic book characters, had been disappointed when Seb took no interest.  
And it was such a melodramatic way to describe what had happened. Or _not_ happened. Because, of course, they hadn’t really _stopped_ being friends, her and Nicola. Not the way school would have understood it, anyway. No rows, no bad mouthing or bitching, no pointed silences or ostentatious ignoring of each other. When she arrived back at school that spring term, Nicola had acted as if the whole thing hadn’t happened, had asked after Daks without querying why Esther had decided to take him home herself. Perhaps if she herself could have said something then, things might have gone back to the way they had been before - but she couldn’t. Shame, fear, pride; whatever it was, it kept her dumb. _She’d_ been the one to stay aloof, to keep her distance. Nicola had been casually, if distantly, friendly for the rest of their school days. When conversation had been general, she had never been excluded. When they’d been on teams, Nicola had always found something to praise in her play - as she always did for every team member.  
Esther had blamed herself for years, for her lack of courage, for her terrible failure of nerve. For letting down the one person she truly cared about. It had taken her even longer to see that it wasn’t in just that one afternoon that she’d failed to be a worthwhile friend to Nicola. She hadn’t fully realised that until after she’d apologised for the first thing, and in doing so, found out that it had never mattered at all.

Their last day at school. She’d gone to return a book to the library, and ended up helping Miranda re-shelve the flurry of late returning books. Nicola had turned up shortly after, on the same errand, and had hung around, chatting idly..  
Miranda shoved a book into its place in the Restricted Section, muttering, as they all did about almost everything that day, “ _Last_ time I have to put a book away here - one of my great _failures_ this year, I think - not being able to persuade Keith to do away with this silly section. As if half the Juniors aren’t passing ‘Lace’ round the dorms anyway.”  
“Not in mine,” said Nicola, grinning.  
“No, they’re all _far_ too terrified of being keel-hauled or whatever it is you Navy types do. How about yours, Esther? Any illegal copies of ‘Petals In The Wind’ being smuggled in?”  
Esther smiled shyly and shrugged, aware that her own dorm found her far from alarming. Though she’d been touched that morning when they’d produced a hand-made card and a present (a hand trowel and fork set that she still had nearly thirty years on), and told her how sorry they were that she was leaving, and sounding, however briefly, as if they actually meant it.  
As Miranda was tidying the Librarian’s desk for the last time, a girl from the Upper Third had come in, and shyly asked if Miranda could sign her autograph book. Miranda looked thoroughly startled, check-mated almost, but took the proffered book. Nicola and Esther left her to deal with it, and wandered on down the long passage towards the hall. Sunlight was pouring in through the large windows and the space was filled with the peculiar atmosphere that deserted assembly rooms have when they’re empty - all the now unimportant announcements and exhortations hanging in the air like the dust motes.  
“I remember cartwheeling all the way across here once,” said Nicola, in sudden reminiscence. “And Val Longstreet came along and caught me doing it. Gosh, do you remember her? She was a pretty useless Head Girl, wasn’t she?”  
“Imagine if we saw a Third Former doing it now,” suggested Esther, the ‘last day’ mood making her bold. “What would you say to them?”  
Nicola grinned. “Tell them not to be so silly and to go about their business, of course!”  
They both laughed, and in that moment of friendly silliness, Esther knew it was her last chance. “Nick - I’m sorry about that time I didn’t sing,” she blurted out. Then, as Nicola stared at her in baffled surprise - “That carol service we did in the Lower Fourth. I said I’d do your solo for you and then I - I couldn’t. I mean, I’ve been thinking about it and I never said sorry. And I thought I _should_ , before we left, you know.” She said all that in a rush, and Nicola was still looking bemused.  
“Did you really? Gosh, I don’t remember that at all.”  
“The verse at the beginning, that Miranda composed. Only I didn’t warn you in time - that I couldn’t go through with it.”  
Nicola was slow to answer, obviously dredging through old memories. “Did I think you were going to do it? Honestly, I can’t remember that at all. I’m sure no-one was expecting you to sing.” And as if that settled the subject, Nicola had gone on to talk about the awfulness of their Last Assembly and Miss Keith’s Leavers Speech.

  
How could Nicola really not remember - something that still haunted her in sleepless stretches of the night? It occurred to her later that maybe Nicola had just been being polite in pretending to have forgotten all about it, embarrassed by her stupidly delayed apology and preferring not to rake over dead bones.  
She obsessed over it, on and off, all that long summer, as she walked round the newsagents, asking to put cards in windows, and waiting for the first call. She was _sure_ that Nicola had been distant with her after _that_ Christmas holiday when she’d taken Daks home. But that had also been the term when Ginty Marlow had tried to run away and ended up being expelled, so maybe Nicola had just been preoccupied with that, and not even noticing her - Esther - at all. That seemed likely, that she was too insignificant to even figure in Nicola’s thoughts. She’d wanted to ask Nicola about Ginty, had imagined what she must be feeling, but if Nicola ever had talked to anyone about any of what went on, it would surely have been Miranda. Or Lawrie more likely, as it was a family thing. And it dawned on her slowly, the more she thought about it, what a poor friend she had been.  
When had _she_ ever been the best person to talk to? When had she actively shown an interest by asking the right questions? When had she ever recounted amusing stories, or told jokes? When had she ever shared anything interesting? When had she ever been the one who always knew the right thing to say? Of _course_ Nicola hadn’t gone on being friends with her - she’d been kind to her when she was new, because she was Nicola and Nicola was like that. But after that - she, Esther, was too quiet and boring - and shy - to be a _good_ friend to anyone and it was really all her own fault.  
She’d even questioned the intensity of her own feelings for Nicola. Had it been a crush? An emotional crush if not a physical one? A word of praise after a match could send her hot and cold with flushed pleasure. Wiith hindsight she realised that being good at sport had saved her at school, had kept her in the centre of things despite her own willingness to shrink into the background.  
But life happened. Her first job came slowly, then word of mouth got her more and more, until her days were filled busily and happily. It took her a little while to save a deposit for a flat, longer still to find one that would take Daks, but eventually a client let her have the ground floor of a run-down block of flats they owned in return for her keeping the communal garden area tidy. So she had a home, a garden almost of her own, and as much work as she wanted. Not much social life, and no close friends, but she didn’t feel the lack while she had Daks.  
Then there’d been Rob, a startling and glamorous interlude. She had been astonished and gratified that the debonair and successful businessman - the son of one of her wealthy older clients - had wanted to dazzle her, had wanted to parade her around at smart restaurants and fancy parties. She was still painfully shy in most social settings, but she’d learned with Rob that she just had to give the odd prompt and he would do all the talking. It was only later that she’d realised that wasn’t always such a good thing.  
She hadn’t seen anyone from school for years. The Friends Reunited craze had come and gone, but post-divorce, rebuilding her gardening business, and effectively looking after Seb as a single mother - Rob’s week-ends with Seb often postponed or cancelled, the promised midweek nights quietly forgotten about - she had been behind in discovering the joys of online browsing. And any sneaking feelings of loneliness that might have crept in as Seb grew up and away from her were swept away by Pauline, and the choir Pauline persuaded her to join. So all in all, she’d never had the time or inclination to dwell on her school years, once they were safely behind her.  
But she’d gone on making the same mistakes. Being hesitant, shy, not saying things that needed to be said. Maybe her marriage would have lasted if she had been more proactive. Maybe Rob had been right to accuse her of not really caring, because she hadn’t made demands, hadn’t done more to stop him straying. Pride and diffidence over making a fuss forced her not to show hurt, to turn a blind eye when she suspected him of having an affair, to hide her feelings in the same place she’d learned to put them when her own parents were divorcing. Perhaps it was that that had made her accept the impending reality of her own divorce with such fatalism.  
Lost in the past, she’d only half noticed her phone pinging, an incongruous background soundtrack to her thoughts. She pulled it out now and checked it, lots of group Whatsapp messages all saying much the same thing; and then one for her alone, Pauline asking her to pop round for a cuppa if she had time between jobs.  
A horn honked, and she realised a car was waiting in the road, the driver gesticulating and mouthing ‘Are you going?’ She waved and nodded, dropped her phone in her bag, fixed her seat belt and started the engine.  
As she pulled out of the parking space, she felt as if she was leaving a phase of her life behind in this familiar street. It would become unfamiliar now, people would move out and others move in, making the small changes that would make the houses look different if she ever passed this way in the future. And the garden would keep growing, buds would unfurl, leaves would open, branches would spread. Life would go on without her. It always did.


	2. Spring.

It seemed that the house’s new owners could manage the garden themselves - until the explosive burst of spring growth overtook them. The Easter bank holidays had come and gone before Esther got a call. Could she possibly spare an hour or two to come and tidy things up? Inclined to say no at first - she did, after all, have a full diary - affection for the garden made her say yes. She had left a day blank to take Pauline for her next appointment, but she could just fit in an hour first thing.  
She wished she hadn’t when she saw it.  
The front door with its elegant coloured glass panel was the same, so too was the glimpse she got of the front hall with its high ceilings and beautiful tiled floor. She didn’t see any more - the door had been opened only half-way by an elderly woman who stood with her foot against it, staring at her suspiciously. She must have been of an age with Esther’s own mother, though she sported a rather incongruous shock of dyed auburn hair which seemed to be at war with the corrugated lines of her face.  
“I’m here to do the garden,” Esther explained. The woman eyed her gardening clothes and trug of tools as if doubting her, then turned and called,, “It’s someone for the garden, she says.”  
From deeper inside the house, Esther heard an answering shout and recognised Michael’s anxious tones. “Tell her I’ll open the side gate if she goes round.”  
Esther smiled to show she’d heard, and the door shut firmly behind her as she turned..

“It looks a bit of a mess at the moment,” said Michael apologetically.  
There had originally been a neat little patio - just big enough for a small round table, a couple of chairs and a few pots of summer bedding. Mrs Smith used to drink her coffee there on sunny mornings. This had been replaced by a concrete area three times the size. The fig tree had gone, as had the camellias. There was no sign of the bird feeders. The lawn beyond the concrete area had been badly churned up and trampled and was mostly poached mud.  
“We could reseed this bit,” suggested Esther, trying to hide her dismay.  
“Well maybe. Best to wait though. We were thinking about getting the lawn replaced with artificial grass.” Michael caught Esther’s involuntarily horrified expression, and said in hasty embarrassment, “Just something we’re looking into at the present stage. Finding out the costs and so on. Mrs Sanger finds cut grass sets off her hay fever.” Glancing round, he caught sight of the old lady who had emerged through the french windows, leaning heavily on a stick, and repeated more loudly for her benefit, “I was telling Esther we might get the artificial lawn - so you can come out here on a nice day if you want.”  
“I dunno,” she muttered ungratefully. “Not if I have to sit here smelling next door’s cooking all over the place.”  
“The builders left rather a mess at the bottom of the garden too,” said Michael hurriedly. “I’ve cleared some of it..”  
“They were all from somewhere else, that’s why. I _said_ they’d be no good. Not one of them spoke a word of English.”  
“Now then, Ellen. We can’t complain about their workmanship, can we?. You know they did a perfectly good job.” He led the way to the bottom of the garden, Esther getting the impression that she was being shepherded out of ear shot. “I’m afraid Mrs Sanger tends to rather - umm - _decided_ opinions. I have to remind myself she had really a very nasty fall last year, and it’s left her not quite herself. Ah, yes, the builders left all this here - I don’t think they quite realised about the daffodils…” The remains of uprooted bushes and the hacked down fig tree had been dumped in a rough pile, mostly spilling over a bed in which crushed and broken daffodils lay scattered. Michael sounded so sheepish and embarrassed that Esther suspected that none of this had been his idea. In fact, he looked so thoroughly down trodden that it was quite easy for Esther to ask him the question that had been niggling at her. “Is Mrs Sanger your mother-in-law?”  
“Yes. Mr Sanger passed away some years ago, and Lois doesn’t have any siblings. We’re all the family she’s got - and she needs a bit of help with things since her fall - though she’s still very independent in _some_ ways.”  
“The name rang a bell,” Esther explained. “There was a girl called Lois Sanger at my school. I just wondered ….”  
“Goodness, that _would_ be a coincidence! Which school? Lois went to some dreadful girls’ boarding school down in Dorset. I can’t remember the name off the top of my head …. But I’ll ask her when she gets back. She’s at the health club doing the early yoga class.”  
Esther dropped her head and rummaged in her trug, looking for her pruning saw. She felt a tongue-tied reluctance to say the name 'Kingscote' and know for sure, either way. Michael went on alternately talking about yoga classes and wondering aloud what the name of the school had been while Esther steadily stripped branches. The camellia had been still in flower when it had been ripped out and dead petals scattered as she worked. Eventually Michael said that he must leave her to it - unnecessarily, for Esther had been longing for him to go for several minutes.  
She wasn’t sure if she was more surprised, curious or dismayed. What she remembered of Lois glitched through her mind like a speeded up rewind function. Beating her in the Cricket Cup - and the rest of the Sixth of course - but hadn’t Lois made it all about herself in the end? And before that, the awfulness of Nicola not being in the netball team, and Miranda being furiously sure that Lois must have somehow got her out, though not even Miranda knew _why_ Lois had it in for Nicola. The funny thing was that it was only Lois’s connection with Nicola that had kept her alive in Esther’s memory at all - she racked her brain trying to think of the names of anyone else who’d been in the Sixth that year and failed, except Janice Scott, and that only because she’d sat at their Form Table, and Miranda had liked her.  
She worked quickly, her hands moving with practised speed even while her thoughts eddied. She shifted the pile of dead bush and twig; the fine stalks and shrivelled leaves onto the compost heap; the bigger branches stacked up to rot slowly in a hidden corner, where they might be of some use to the small creatures who were about to lose their cover of grassy turf to a roll of plastic. Some of the daffodils had survived their bashing, she was pleased to see.  
A brisk session of weeding along the crazy paving path that wound round the far end of the garden and her time was up. At least, she thought while packing up, she was going to have something new to tell Pauline today, during the long slog of her chemo session.

Pauline’s ‘bit of a throat’ had turned out to be cancer. She had come to choir practice one night - just to listen, she said, and then told them all afterwards over a box of her homemade brownies. She had told them as casually as she could; that she was lucky really, it was very treatable, she said, almost 100% chance of a positive outcome, just a course of chemo, and then a course of radiotherapy, then some time to get over the treatment. It would be no time at all before she’d be back as good as new, she said.  
Of course, they all rallied round. They made casseroles and soup, they offered lifts, they visited. Her son, away at university in Manchester, was to be kept as unworried as possible. But it was mostly Esther that Pauline wanted.  
‘I’m going to lose my voice before this is over,’ she’d told Esther privately. ‘You’ll have to get used to doing all the talking then.’ And they’d both laughed, because that was a reversal of how their relationship worked. Pauline was the exuberant talker, always chatty, always with something to say, and Esther was the listener, always needing to be prodded to share her news.  
But after the first couple of chemo sessions, Pauline admitted that it was more restful having Esther there than any of the others. ‘You’re like a beautiful painting of the Madonna. I just feel better knowing you’re there, looking after me. I don’t feel I have to babble all the time.’

She had first met Pauline when Seb and Pauline’s son Stephen were in the same Reception class at school. Friendship had begun while sitting awkwardly side by side on hard plastic chairs on Saturday afternoons, at one Softplay or bouncy castle birthday party after another. They had much in common - both divorced with an only son, and their own parents physically or emotionally distant - but also much that was alien to each other. Pauline was opinionated, argumentative, liked to talk, to be involved, to be at the centre of things. Esther was happy to spin quietly in her orbit. Pauline talked with endless affection about her mother, who had filled their council flat with love after her father’s early death, despite the financial struggles. Esther avoided talking about her own mother, who had moved with her step-father to an expat community in Spain almost as soon as Esther’s half-brother had grown up and left home.  
Then they both found themselves ‘volunteered’ for a project at their sons’ school, to turn an unpromising patch of playground into a vegetable garden. Esther was roped in because Seb proudly told his teacher that ‘his mum could make _anything_ grow’. Pauline, who worked as a health visitor and was passionate about good cooking, had complained once too often to the head-teacher about the standard of the school dinners, and found herself challenged to help the children grow, cook and eat their own vegetables. With occasional erratic help from a few other parents, they not only did it but made it a great success for several years in a row. When their own boys moved up to Secondary School they handed over their gardening gloves to a new generation of ‘volunteers’. And that might have been the end of it. Their sons, who when small had played with each other happily enough at meet-ups in the park or the Natural History Museum on rainy days, had grown to the age where they chose to pick their own friends, and were largely indifferent to each other. Esther was far too diffident to suggest doing something just as friends, without the crutch of accompanying children.  
But Pauline had heard Esther humming as she worked along the vegetable rows, even breaking into song when she was really absorbed in what she was doing. And she wanted Esther to join her choir. Esther’s excuses fell on deaf ears. No, it didn’t matter that she wasn’t religious, it wasn’t a church choir. No, Seb was too old to need a babysitter - it was only a couple of evenings a week, and they never finished late. No, no-one was going to care if she was ‘good enough’, they all just enjoyed meeting up to make a jolly noise and no-one ‘judged’ each other’s voice. They did enter competitions sometimes, but no-one ever cared if they won or lost. Esther would see for herself how much fun and how friendly it was. They put on charity concerts from time to time but no-one ever had to stand up and sing solo.

As it turned out that wasn’t entirely true. They all sang solo occasionally, but only ever the odd first line, maybe a verse, and only from their place in the ranks. Even Esther found herself doing it once or twice when asked. It wasn’t at all like school. You didn’t have to be looked at. By the time anyone in the audience had looked along the rows of the choir to pick out the one singing solo, everybody else had joined in anyway. And Pauline had been accurate about everything else. It _was_ fun, it _was_ friendly. Sensing her shyness the others didn’t single her out to begin with, and she only came gradually to the surprised realisation that her voice was valued. But she enjoyed it most of all when they were all singing together and she lost all self-consciousness, able to lift up her voice to its fullest, to blend in with the singer on her left, her right, behind and in front of her, until she felt as though they were all truly singing as one magnificent voice.  
It was funny how it had never felt like that at school, despite all Miss Keith’s strictures about their ‘communal effort’. No-one in this choir would ever use the phrase ‘communal effort’; they came from all over, and went their separate ways when the singing stopped. And it was never an _effort_ , it was always _fun_.

Lois Sanger’s name had cast her back to school.  
“Tell me what this awful girl did back then,” said Pauline, as they sat in snarled traffic on their way to the hospital.  
“Do you really want to hear about all that?” asked Esther doubtfully.  
“Yes. I want to be distracted. And you know how curious I am about that posh school you went to - which you obviously hated!”  
“Not _hated._ I mean - it was a _good_ school - and I was lucky to go somewhere like that in lots of ways…”  
“Didn’t send your own boy to boarding school though, did you?”  
That couldn’t be argued with. She would never, ever have sent Seb away. How easily her own mother had packed _her_ away - even half-terms and holidays.  
“She - Lois, I mean, was Games Captain the year I started. I don’t remember noticing that much about her to start with. She was quite pretty, I think, and lots of people did like her a lot. She could turn on the charm. But for some reason she hated the girl who was the best player in our year, who should have been team captain. But not her twin sister, for some reason, just Nicola.”  
“Jealous maybe?”  
“But we were quite a bit younger. And she was Games Captain, which means the best sports person in the school. What would she have to be jealous about?”  
“Lack of confidence? Thought someone else having something meant less of it for her? People are funny like that.”  
“Maybe,” said Esther, distractedly letting a white van push into the lane in front of her.  
Pauline mused, “ I never felt that way myself. No-one ever had anything I wanted enough to take off them.”  
“Not even Miss Cornflakes?” Pauline’s divorce had been more tempestuous than Esther’s, and the name she gave her ex’s girlfriend referred to the moment she’d arrived home earlier than expected after a night shift at the hospital, to find a strange woman in her kitchen eating _her_ cornflakes.  
“Especially not her. It’s me who should be thanking her for taking his useless hide off my hands.”  
“I used to be jealous of all the people who could stand up and perform - without even _caring_ about what anyone thought,” said Esther. “But I wanted to _be_ like them, not to stop _them_ being good. It just seems really odd, that a Sixth Former would bother thinking _enough_ about a third year to hate them.”  
“You can tell something about a person by who they hate,” said Pauline.  
“Who do you hate? In real life, I mean, not politics.”  
“Politics _is_ real life,” Pauline said fiercely, but with a gentle squeeze of Esther’s arm to show that she wasn’t snapping at her personally.  
“People you actually know,” amended Esther.  
Pauline pondered again. “I dunno. I hate bad ideas, not the people who have them.” .  
The lights changed, traffic moved at last, and they eased into a better stretch of road.  
“She might have totally changed anyway - if she’s teaching yoga now,” Esther wondered aloud. She had only the vaguest idea of what yoga entailed, gardening having always kept her fit and supple enough to avoid exercise classes.  
“Had a spiritual awakening you mean? I doubt it. It takes more than sitting cross-legged and taking a few deep breaths to change someone.”  
“But if she really wanted to change …It’s been a long time, after all.”  
Esther turned the car down the ramp into the underground car park. The artificial light and hospital signage imposed itself. Their conversation halted.  
“You don’t have to stay the whole time today. Go and get your shopping done,” suggested Pauline.  
Esther nodded. Sometimes, Pauline preferred to be on her own, to listen to music, read or simply doze. “Do you want me to get you anything?”  
“Yes, a big bar of Dairy Milk and a pack of Jammie Dodgers…”  
“But…” Esther was doubtful. Pauline had been told to avoid sugary foods.  
Pauline laughed, nudging her.. “ _You’ll_ have to eat it for me. I want to know someone’s enjoying it and you’re thin enough!”

Esther wandered round a couple of shops, but as was usual when shopping these days, she quickly found herself both tired and bored. She turned into an anonymous chain cafe, where she could kill time with coffee and a sandwich. After a moment’s thought she also chose a bakewell tart with particularly thick icing. Pauline took a vicarious pleasure in hearing about other people eating what she couldn’t, and Esther would need all her powers of description to satisfy her.  
The food was over-priced, but she could sit in a quiet corner with her tablet for as long as she wanted. She wrote her own gardening blog every week, which now had a fair number of readers. She settled down to reply to this week’s comments and answer any questions. But, feeling unfocused and looking for distraction, she found herself typing Lois’ name into the search bar, and then, just in case there really were hundreds of people with the same name, ‘yoga’ and ‘London’. She found the right webpage third entry down the list.  
There were photos - a person on a beach, standing on one leg with arms out-stretched, taken silhouetted against a sunset sky. Another one arched over backwards like a bridge, taken from a low angle. Again on a beach but with glittering white buildings as a distant backdrop.  
Esther looked at the text beneath the photos. ‘I’ve been a teacher and player of traditional sports for over twenty years, so I’ve had my fair share of sporting injuries! It was only when I took up yoga that I learned to listen to what my body was telling me. You can train your body to work in harmony with your mind, to become both fitter and stronger yet fluid and free of tension….’  
There was a lot more about different types of yoga, which Esther skim-read, then a list of classes and times.  
Abruptly impatient with herself, Esther clicked off the page and returned to her own blog. She felt slightly ashamed; not only was she wasting time but she had a twitchy sense of having been needlessly nosy. Much better to get back to her own business. She saw that she had a new question from a reader about pinching out seedlings. She would answer that first, and then she would head back to the hospital, and see if Pauline was ready for some company.


	3. Summer.

There was a mini heatwave in late May; a sudden shock of heat that made the spring flowers wilt and students in their exam halls long for the outdoors. It was a sweltering hot morning when Esther made her next visit to Michael and Lois’ house, wheeling her lawn mower down the side-passage, to find Mrs Sanger already installed at the patio table.  
“Oh,” she asked doubtfully. “Do you mind if I do the mowing?”  
“Don’t you worry about _me_ ,” Ellen answered, sourly. “It’s not like anybody else does.”  
Michael said quickly, “I was just about to make Ellen some tea. Would you like one, Esther?”  
“Yes, that would be lovely, thanks.” Esther answered automatically, partly because Michael had the sort of face that made one feel guilty saying no, even to something as innocuous as a cup of tea, and partly because she knew her water bottle would already be warm and flat tasting.  
She had mowed several strips of the lawn when Michael returned with a tray. He left it on the table and backed away, muttering about stuff he had to do. Was she supposed to sit down at the table with Mrs Sanger, Esther wondered, eyeing the two watery looking mugs of tea. She politely handed one across to the old woman.  
“You might as well sit down. You don’t want to be rushing around in this heat,” Ellen said, fanning herself with her Daily Mail.  
Despite the grudging tone, Esther caught an off-handed note of hope in the invitation. “Oh, well, thanks, yes I will,” she replied, seating herself reluctantly at the other side of the table.  
“It’s not _my_ idea, you know,” said Mrs Sanger, obliquely.  
Esther looked at her, puzzled.  
“The _grass_ ,” explained Mrs Sanger, as if Esther was being slow. “It’s not me that wants to put the fake stuff down. I like a nice lawn. If anyone gets hay fever it’s Lois.”  
Esther murmured, noncommittally.  
“Course, I thought she’d grown out of all that,” added the old lady. “I didn’t think it bothered her so much these days. She had it bad as a child though. She used to play tennis at the club in the holidays - it was ever so nice - hanging baskets outside the club house and tubs of flowers everywhere - they kept it lovely - but you always knew when the pollen was playing her up. Put her off her game, she said. Our Lolo could beat most of the children that played there, she was that good, even when she was one of the youngest. But you could always tell when the pollen was bad. She’d be missing easy shots, losing games, and she’d say it was the hay fever making her slow. It gave her a rotten sore head.”  
“Yes, it’s a horrible thing to have,” agreed Esther.  
Mrs Sanger blew across the surface of her tea. “Too strong,” she muttered. “He always makes it too strong.”  
Esther, whose years of outdoor work had taught her to prefer a proper builder’s brew, had been sipping rather dubiously at the tea, finding it unappealingly weak. “It seems fine to me,” she lied, placatingly.  
“Maybe you got second go of the teabag. It turns my stomach, anything too strong. I have terrible trouble with it these days.”  
Esther murmured politely.  
“I didn’t used to,” Mrs Sanger said, warming to her theme. “I’d eat anything once. It’s having ulcers, the doctors say. I can’t even smell something strong nowadays. Next door is always cooking garlic and the smell comes all over. It makes me nauseous.”  
“Oh, that’s terrible,” said Esther, with more genuine sympathy. “I’ve a friend who can’t eat much at the moment and it’s awful.”  
“I used to love trying new things, foreign food, all sorts. When my Arthur and I were courting, we’d eat everything. We had frogs' legs once. He used to show off, taking me to fancy places. Posh French restaurants….” Her voice drifted, eyes distant.  
“Was Arthur Lois’s father?”  
“Yes. He thought the world of her, he did. Look at her, he used to say. That’s our Lolo. Going off to teach in all those foreign places. She can do anything now, go anywhere. That’s down to us, Ellie, he said, sending her to that school.” Her eyes fixed on Esther, with sudden intent. “You went there too, Michael said. Did you like it?”  
“Y- yes, mostly. It was a good school.” The old lady’s eyes seemed to be boring into hers, seeking more. “Academically it was excellent, “ Esther added. “And it was very sporty, of course. I was there when Lois was Games Captain.”  
A look of pride softened Mrs Sanger’s face. “Yes, it was good for all that, wasn't it? All the sports, netball, tennis and cricket. All those playing fields and the countryside, and the beach. We were ever so pleased when we found it for her. Because we lived in the hotel in town, you see, we wanted her to have a bit of fresh air and outdoors. Course, she took after Arthur with the games. He could play cricket ever so well, but he never had the time. He might have been a professional if he’d ever had his chance.”  
“What did Arthur do?”  
“We met on the cruise liners. He was the purser, and I was entertainment. Organising games on deck, bit of singing after dinner. I used to be in a double act with the piano player, and everyone thought we were going together, but he wasn’t that sort. Arthur was working his way up - he had all the brains, and I had all the beauty. Not that you’d know it now, eh?” She laughed sharply. “Go on, you can agree if you like, I won’t mind!” Her gimlet eyes gleamed, daring Esther to agree. Esther didn’t dare.  
“Is that why you sent Lois away to school?” She asked. “Because you were working on a ship?”  
“No, we’d packed that in by then and had the guesthouse. We saved all our pay, you see, when we were on the boats. Arthur had the dream to run his own place, a hotel on the seafront he wanted. Somewhere quiet but classy. But we couldn’t manage that. We got a place in Birmingham - that’s where Arthur came from - not far from the station. A good spot for business travellers, you know, but not such a good place for kiddies to grow up. That’s why we sent Lois to a nice school in the countryside, you see.”  
The french window swung open behind them and there was a brisk step on the patio.  
“Well, talk of the devil,” said Ellen. “Here she is.”  
Esther swung around. “Has Mum been chewing your ear off?” asked Lois. She sounded polite, not unfriendly, but Esther started and rose guiltily. She had, after all, been technically sitting down on the job. But Lois smiled at her, perfectly charming but with no apparent recognition in her eyes. She was attractive, Esther saw; stretchy fitted yoga leggings and top showing off a slim, still youthful figure. A touch of natural make-up, and hair dyed a dark honey blonde: she could have been a model - one of the slightly older ones from something like a Boden catalogue, thought Esther.  
“Michael said....” began Lois, and then recognition visibly broke over her face. “Oh, of course! I _do_ remember you! You’re the one who ran away before the Christmas play that time!”  
The hot wave of embarrassment started in Esther’s chest, rising up her neck and cheeks until she felt as if her whole face was on fire. The worst moment of her life came vividly to mind, with all the horror of a recurring nightmare. Thinking that Daks was going to be - _dealt_ with - an utterly dark void that had opened up before her. Even in later years, when Seb had his first infant illness and she’d rushed him to A and E to be checked up on, she’d known deep down that she was just being a fussing new mother. But _that_ letter -  
She was temporarily unable to speak. Luckily Lois wasn’t noticing, was chatting animatedly to her mother. “Goodness, it was _such_ a drama, do you remember me telling you about it at the time, Mum, when we did the Play in the Minster? Esther had gone AWOL and there was no-one to sing the solos - and the show about to go on!” She beamed, amused by her own story. “And the Marlow brats and Keith’s niece thought _they_ could all swop over and no-one would notice. There was a terrific huha!”  
Mrs Sanger was watching her with eager, curious eyes. Esther found her voice at last. “ I had to go home to see about - about my dog. I thought - well, it was all a misunderstanding as it turned out - but I thought he was going to be put - put down.”  
Lois was still enjoying the memory. “And the Staff didn’t have any choice but to let Lawrie Marlow do the Shepherd Boy. Everyone thought she was going to be such a famous actor, didn’t they?”  
“Who’s that then? _I’ve_ never heard of her,” asked Mrs Sanger.  
“No, she never did anything much as far as I know. Did she?” Lois flashed the question at Esther.  
“She did a bit, I think,” answered Esther. “She was on Casualty once.”  
“Oh, I never saw that …. Though I’ve been away so much, I haven’t really watched much British telly … Have you kept in touch with anyone - anyone else from those days?”  
Esther admitted that she hadn’t. There had been one or two weddings that old classmates had been invited to, but the last one she’d been to had been over twenty years ago.  
“No, I could never be bothered with all that Old Girls stuff,” said Lois. “All that ‘best days of your lives’ nonsense - Michael keeps up with some of his old school friends, but I don’t see the point. I’d rather move on!” Lois laughed, but Esther, slowly coming out of the fog of her own embarrassment was aware that Lois’s laugh wasn’t reaching her eyes..  
“I should finish the lawn,” she said, putting her half drunk mug of tea back on the tray.  
“Sure. We’ll catch up later,” said Lois pleasantly.  
Esther started up the lawnmower again. She still felt uncomfortably shaken by the memories that Lois had stirred up. The utter terror she’d felt that day, the gaping chasm of a future in which she knew she _couldn’t_ go on….. And in the depths of that total blackness, Nicola shining a light - Daks safe and alive, and - something of a secondary reprieve - those dreaded solos sung… Nicola had saved her, over and over, in every possible way. And she, hopeless wimp that she was, couldn’t even sing four lines to return thanks…  
But the familiar tasks of the garden started to soothe. The millpond of her thoughts calmed as she pushed the mower, emptied the container of cut grass, dead headed the early roses and pruned the wilder excess growth of the shrubs. Then the repetitive routine of weeding. There were spaces in the beds for summer flowers, and in the past she had brought her own homegrown plug plants to put in; she supposed she should ask Lois or Michael what they wanted.  
She looked up and as if materialising in response to her thought, saw Lois coming down the garden path. She had changed into a loose swishy summer dress, revealing smooth tanned shoulders and toned arms.  
Esther asked about the flowers.  
“Oh, you’d better ask Michael. The garden’s more his thing really.” Lois sipped from the bottle of spring water she carried. “I like having the space - for barbecues and having friends round, you know, but I don’t really mind what grows where.” She paused and Esther wondered what to say. She had the impression that it was Lois who was weighing her words, wanting to speak, but cautious.  
“Michael said you’d been working at a school in Dubai,” she said. “That must have been a bit different?”  
“It had its moments. I’m glad to have given all that up to be honest. At least now I’m only teaching adults, and one knows that they actually _want_ to be there.”  
“How’s it going, starting new classes here?”  
“Oh, well enough, I suppose. It’s early days yet. There’s rather a petty atmosphere at the health club unfortunately which is causing a few niggles….. Did you keep up with any sports after school?”  
“No. At least, only a bit of cricket in the park when my son and his friends were young, but nothing serious.”  
Lois didn’t pick up on the cue, was obviously not interested in Esther’s own life. She said, rather abruptly, “It was an awful school, wasn’t it? Such a relief to leave and never look back. Dreadful snobby place. Don’t you think?”  
Esther stammered, “Oh, I don’t know. I suppose so.” It had never occurred to her that it was a bad school. _She_ had been unhappy, dreadfully so at times, but she'd supposed that was a fault in herself, not the school. “It was pretty good in some ways,” she added lamely. “Some of the teachers were all right.”  
“They only liked you if you were from the right sort of family though,” said Lois scornfully. “With a spare farm in your back pocket and Daddy a Captain in the Navy. If you were the type that acted like you should be ruling the world.”  
“I suppose all boarding schools are a bit like that, “ said Esther, weakly, taken aback by the venom in Lois’s voice.  
“Maybe. You were in the same year as the Marlow twins, weren’t you? “  
Esther nodded, hoping desperately that Lois wasn’t going to say something about Nicola, helplessly aware that she wasn’t going to know what to say. But Lois seemed to catch herself, saying instead, “Did you ever come across Rowan? The older sister?”  
“No,” Esther said with relief. “I only started in the Upper Thirds, and she’d left by then.”  
“Ah. She was the worst for swanning around as if she owned the place, and most of the staff fell over themselves to agree with her.”  
“Did - did they?” asked Esther doubtfully.  
“The sort of person who thinks _they_ ought to be in charge of everything,” said Lois. “She left to run the family place in the end. Or so they _said_.”  
“Y-yes. They lived on a farm.” Lucky Daks, she remembered thinking, going to stay in the country. There must have been rabbits to chase and exciting hedgerows to sniff along and smelly things to roll in … She’d always worried that he found the city parks rather a let-down after his year of spending the holidays at Trennels.  
“Were you friendly with the twins?” asked Lois. Her voice was casual, as if the answer couldn’t matter less, but Esther realised that it did matter. It mattered a lot. And it mattered to her that she was truthful.  
“Not Lawrie so much,” she answered. “But Nicola, yes. We weren’t close friends, but - but I always really liked her. She was _kind_. We were on teams together a lot, and she was a really good captain. _Everybody_ liked her.”  
She felt ridiculously and secretly defiant, defending Nicola against Lois, a thirty year old battle that no longer needed fighting, but also secretly relieved that she hadn’t feebly folded.  
“Hmm,” Lois murmured noncommittally, a sound that could mean anything. Then, quite visibly, she took a breath and mentally checked herself.  
“Oh well, I suppose it’s all in the past, isn’t it? We have to learn to love ourselves _now_ and leave the mistakes of the past behind one. I’m not the person I was at school. Every time we walk through a doorway we leave our old self behind.”  
Esther blinked. Lois sounded as though she was quoting something.  
Lois smiled at her, her quick charming self again. “I’ve grown so much since I started practising yoga. I’ve learnt to centre myself in the here and now…. I suppose you’ve got gardening to keep you grounded? If you ever fancied trying a class, or any of your friends, I’ve still got a few spare places to fill. I do one to one sessions as well, if any of your clients might be interested?”  
Esther vaguely promised to mention it, while being fairly sure she would do no such thing.

Pauline, who loved cooking, and loved eating even more, had always had a comfortably padded figure. She had joked at first about the weight she was losing, boasting gleefully that she ‘actually had cheekbones now’. But as her treatment progressed, she looked, as she said herself, ‘like a refugee in my own clothes’.  
She talked only when she had to, in a low whisper. For the first time in her life, Esther found herself being the one who chatted while someone else listened. She knew Pauline felt tired most of the time, and the effort of putting on a cheerful face for her well-wishers exhausted her. So she got into the habit of calling round at the end of her working day, to do a little cleaning, put a load of washing on, or change the cat’s litter tray. She talked as she worked, much as she would have once chatted to Daks as she pottered round her own home. It was strangely easy to talk when one wasn’t waiting for an answer.  
Pauline’s son Stephen was expected home for the summer, and Esther had just done a big shop for them, working her way down a long list of favourite foods that Pauline had given her. She had hoped that Stephen’s imminent return would give Pauline a much needed boost, but she found her at an unusually low ebb.  
“Can I do anything else?” she asked, after she’d unpacked all the shopping. Pauline shook her head. Esther hesitated. There was obviously something wrong - or something worse wrong than usual - but she didn’t know how to ask. To say ‘are you ok?’ to someone who was living with a terrible illness seemed crass - but how else? “Is there something else ?” she asked.  
Pauline tapped the book which lay on the table beside her. Esther glanced at it, a celebrity autobiography. Having done her own research after Pauline was first diagnosed, and picked up all sorts of dribs and drabs of information, she recognised it. He’d had the same sort of throat cancer Pauline had.  
Pauline had a notepad on which she scribbled when she wanted to say something. She wrote quickly, and showed Esther - ‘He can’t sing any more.’  
“But _he’s_ not a singer?” He was a television personality, known for presenting gameshows.  
“But he - ” Pauline started to whisper, then gave up and opened the book to a page that she’d marked. _There_ \- she pointed to a passage. Esther took it and read. She saw what Pauline had been reading. That despite the full recovery the celebrity had made, the one thing that hadn’t been the same afterwards was their ability to hold a tune, having previously had a decent singing voice. Esther privately cursed the well-meaning friend who’d given the book to Pauline, presumably believing it to be an upbeat story of recovery.  
“Every case is different,” Esther said, urgently. “It might not be the same for you.”  
Pauline scribbled, frantically. ‘It will. Doctor said there was a chance of me not singing again.’ The note was almost illegible. As Esther read, Pauline scribbled another, more slowly. ‘ Can you imagine? It’s like you not being able to grow things.’  
There was absolutely nothing she could say. She felt dangerously close to tears herself. Pauline grabbed her hand and she squeezed it back, hard.

The next time she returned to Lois’s garden she found the remains of some sort of a party scattered around; with a new barbecue standing at the edge of the patio area, still perceptibly warm to the touch and filled with crumbly white ash. Dirty paper plates containing the remains of burnt offerings were piled on the table, among empty bottles and some half full plastic glasses, hapless wasps drowning in the dregs.  
Most striking though was a new statue - a solar powered water feature - at the edge of the patio, roughly where the fig tree used to be. A seated Buddha, eyes closed and palms cupped in the meditative pose, while water tinkled from one basin to another before him. It was rather good, if you liked that sort of thing, thought Esther grudgingly.  
There were also two lightweight bamboo screens partially obscuring the view of the garden from the patio, and a long roll of matting pushed to the side. As Esther glanced around, Mrs Sanger pushed open the french windows and stepped outside. She was walking without a stick today, and seemed visibly more spritely. But she responded to Esther’s ‘good morning’ with a grumble. “Is it? Not if you didn’t get a wink of sleep last night. I was tossing and turning all night, after the party.”  
“Oh, you had a party, did you?” asked Esther.  
“Not me. It was Lois’s birthday. And they combined it with a bit of a house-warming do. They’re trying to make friends with _all_ the neighbours.”  
“Oh, that’s a good idea,” said Esther, although the idea of throwing a party for as-yet unknown neighbours would have terrified her.  
Mrs Sanger sniffed. “Maybe. And _that_ was Michael’s present for Lolo,” she added, nodding at the Buddha.  
“It’s very nice,” said Esther, meaning it. She’d seen some very tacky garden Buddhas in her time, but this was a pleasing one.  
“Makes me want to pee, the sound of that blessed water running all the time,” Mrs Sanger replied, sounding bitter.  
“Oh dear,” said Esther with sympathy. “I’m sure there’s a switch that turns the pump off if you want it to stop,”  
Mrs Sanger glowered at the Buddha, as if holding him personally responsible. “It’s all right for him - whoever he is. He wouldn’t have that smirk on his face if _he’d_ ever had a baby. Eighteen hours it took me having Lois. My bladder’s never been the same since!”  
Esther smiled. “I don’t suppose he had to change many nappies either,” she joked politely, and Mrs Sanger cackled in a friendly way.  
Esther looked at the bamboo screens. They were very light, presumably intended to be portable. She could picture them on either side of the patio, with a gap in the middle to frame a view of the garden beyond. She started to see how the patio could be turned into a more attractive area - “I could bring some climbers to grow against these if you liked, in planters. Or are they going to be moved around?”  
“They’re for a backdrop,” said Mrs Sanger. “They’re going to film Lolo doing her yoga out here. They’re going to put it online for people to watch. On Youtube. That’s how people do it these days, so they say.”  
“Oh, I see. That’s a good idea,” said Esther. “Online classes are very popular these days.”  
“Yes, and it’s easier not to fall out with people when they’re on the other side of a screen.”  
Esther, startled, shot a swift look at Lois’s mother. Had she just said what she’d meant, or meant what she’d implied? But Mrs Sanger was looking at the mess on the table. “There’s always a fly in the ointment, it seems,” she said. “Wherever Lolo goes. There’s always someone or something giving her gyp.”  
Esther hesitated, wondering if she was going to say any more. But she didn’t. Possibly she’d already said more than she’d intended. Either way, her face settled back into its usual furrowed expression of discontent with the world.  
Esther picked up the tray of plug plants she’d brought, and went to plant them out. Scattered around the garden she found the debris of the party; wine glasses abandoned on steps, cigarette butts in the flowerbeds, paper napkins blown across the grass. When she’d accumulated a pile of rubbish, she went and dumped it on the patio. Michael, who had come out with a tray to clear the table, gave her a rather sleepy ‘good morning’. Mrs Sanger, drinking her morning tea, said nothing more that day.  
But in the weeks that passed, Esther often found the old lady wandering into the garden when she was there working. Her appearances always affected to be casual, but she often seemed eager to start talking. Her conversation was usually limited to complaints about her various ailments; or unfriendly comments about the foreign students who lodged with them. But just occasionally she told a story from happier times; flying out to Hong Kong to see Lois when she first got a job abroad; Lois winning a Cup at a Diving Gala when she was thirteen; her and Arthur walking on the deck of an ocean liner under the moonlight …. Esther generally listened to her with patience. She supposed the old lady was actually rather lonely.

She couldn’t have said why exactly - because she only saw Lois or Michael at fleeting intervals - but Esther got the distinct impression that no-one in the house was particularly contented, either with themselves or each other.


	4. Autumn.

The grass came back, with Esther’s encouragement. A summer of mostly sunny days, and regular gentle rain falling overnight and the lawn grew lush and green. New blades pushed through the trampled earth, shoots multiplied and spread. By summer’s end no-one would know where the damage had been done.  
The idea of the imitation lawn had not been mentioned again in Esther’s presence, but Michael and Lois had not yet bought their own lawnmower, so she wasn’t sure whether to hope or not. She had to bring her own, a hassle to push down the long street when she wasn’t lucky finding a parking place. But she cut and raked and fed the lawn, thinking all the while that surely anyone could see how much more beautiful something was that lived and grew than something plastic that never changed.  
Over previous summers, Seb had worked with her, doing the heavy but semi-skilled jobs like mowing grass and trimming hedges. This year however, he’d rung to say that he was going to spend the summer staying with his girlfriend. She apparently spent her holidays getting paid days as an ‘extra’ - there were lots of film and TV production companies shooting in her area and she always picked up a few days work - sometimes several weeks - and claimed that Seb could too, if he joined the same agency. It all seemed rather sketchy to Esther, but on the whole, she was glad. She’d miss him, of course, but she was pleased that he’d found someone that he seemed to be keen on.  
She had always enjoyed Seb’s company, as he seemed to enjoy hers. Even in his later teenage years, he had never seemingly been troubled by a spirit of teenage angst or rebellion. He had been something of an all-rounder at school, without ever being the high flyer Rob would have liked him to be. He was good enough at sports to be on teams without ever being the star player; and kept his position in the top set easily without ever being top of the class. He didn’t have Rob’s extrovert gregariousness, but neither did he have Esther’s incapacitating shyness; having a steady circle of friends, boys who seemed to be as easy going and unphased by life as he was.  
Rob would have liked him to go in for science or IT, something potentially high earning, but Seb had picked all humanities for his A levels. He’d chosen to do history at uni, mainly because he didn’t know what _else_ to do, with no career plans yet for when he’d finished.  
Esther didn’t care _what_ he ended up doing, but she did worry that he didn’t seem to have any one thing that he desperately _wanted_ to do, in the way that she had already known at fourteen that she wanted to be a gardener.  
At the very end of the holidays, he came home for a couple of days. It had been fun, he told her; long days and lots of hanging around, but it had been interesting, seeing how they made scenes and created backgrounds. The woman from the agency had even asked him if he’d ever thought of trying to get into acting. He had a very good face for television, she’d told him. He thought he might join the Drama Society next term. Apparently, he said, very off-hand, you could even do an MA in acting….  
Esther was startled. She tried to see him as others might, without the mother filter through which she viewed him. Of course _she_ thought he was beautiful, she always had. But her calm, sensible, undramatic boy … She wasn’t sure if what she felt for him was fear, or pride, or hope even. But most of all, she was aware of a sort of joyous relief - that whatever had caused her own paralysing phobia of being _looked_ at, her son was blessedly free from it.

“He was never even in a school play,” she said to Pauline, talking it over. “Not after primary school anyway. And only then because everyone had to. Remember when they were sheep in Year One?”  
“He was a very good sheep,” said Pauline, her returning voice a scratchy whisper, but now she could talk a little, she preferred to speak than write. Esther laughed. She’d tried to be calmly encouraging while Seb told her all about it, but with Pauline she felt free to share her anxiety. “What does it even mean, a good face for TV?”  
Pauline said, “Like yours. Worth looking at. Good in close up.”

Pauline’s son, Stephen, had always had an idea of what he wanted to do; although his idea had evolved over the years - from being a rapper to a DJ to something in music production. He came home from college planning to spend his summer working at festivals and club nights.  
It was a shock for him to see the change in his mother. He had returned in time to see the worst effects of her treatment, the voicelessness, the coughing, the pain and nausea. He wanted to cancel all his own plans for the summer, but Pauline wouldn’t let him, and recruited Esther to reassure him that she would be well looked after by her friends if he wanted to spend weekends away.  
One thing she did let Stephen do for her was to borrow some decent sound equipment from a mate, and record their choir practices, so that while she was too weak to come and hear them, she could still listen at home. The first time he came the practice was rather a shambles, but by the second time they had planned more of a structured session. Those who knew her best each picked one of her favourite songs from their repertoire, and introduced it with a short message.  
It sounded so good on the recording that an idea was proposed of doing something similar as an actual concert. A fundraiser, they thought, for two of Pauline’s chosen cancer charities. They could put it on before Christmas, someone suggested and make it a Christmas Concert with carols and other festive music. They would hire somewhere a bit bigger than they usually went for, and sell tickets. In the past they’d sung in small halls, for mostly friends and family, and held collections. But they wanted to make this a big deal, both to raise money and to celebrate Pauline’s recovery.  
She had finished her treatment and spent a short time in hospital having surgery, and was now slowly recovering from the effects of both. She’d completely lost voice, appetite and sense of taste for a while, but they were slowly, slowly returning.  
The choir spent a few enjoyably argumentative evenings discussing the hows and wherefores. One of the keen cooks suggested providing free refreshments - people would be more willing to shell out for a ticket if they thought they’d get a home made mince pie and a hot drink as well, she said, convincing them. Possible venues were put forward and rejected - one was cheap to hire but had awful acoustics, another was too expensive. The most possible it seemed was a nearby church, which could be used for an evening in return for part of the proceeds going to its own centre for the homeless. ‘We’d have to do more carols and cut out anything too frisky,’ said someone; there were collective guffaws at the idea of them singing anything ‘frisky’.  
To Esther’s surprise, she found her opinion being asked and deferred to, particularly in the choice of songs. She realised she had become Pauline’s semi-official ‘voice’, which lent her a veneer of confidence with which she threw herself into helping organise the show. She was also tasked with reporting back to Pauline on how the plans and preparations were going, and gathering her opinion on their choices of songs.  
They had a provisional program of two halves in rehearsal by the time Pauline felt strong enough to come along and sit in on choir practice one night.  
They opened with ‘White Water Hymnal’ and then moved on to the ‘Carol of the Bells’. Then a pause for debate. Which should they open with? Which would be best to close the first half with? What about ‘Walking in the Air’ or ‘Hark the Herald Angels’?  
“Where are you putting ‘Once In Royal David’s City’?’ asked Pauline.  
There was a brief, awkward pause. They had used that carol when doing Christmas concerts in the past, but they had always done it in the traditional way - with the first verse as a solo - and for as long as any of them could remember, it had always been Pauline who had sung it.  
“We could - “ “What if -” “How about -” Various people started and stopped. “We could open with that,” said Carla, who usually conducted. “But what if we do it all together this year? What do you think? Or should one of us do the solo verse?”  
Pauline paused, considering. She caught Esther’s eye. Esther saw the unspoken question. She barely imagined herself nodding, but it was enough for Pauline to see.  
“I think Esther could do it,” said Pauline. “I’d like that.”

One of the choir members who worked in a printer’s office, got them some tickets printed up. Glossy, professional and in Christmassy colours, they were shared out at choir practice with instructions to sell as many as possible. Esther, feeling horribly shy about it, offered them to all her gardening clients, and was pleased by how many people were willing to take them. Of course, lots of the people that she gardened for were cash rich but time poor, and found it only too easy to hand over money for a good cause, with no definite intention of actually coming on the night. Even so, Esther began to feel apprehensive at the thought of having so many people who knew her there to watch.  
But the money was being raised for charity in fact, and for Pauline in spirit, so she kept forcing herself to ask. She caught Michael one damp, grey day in late November, thinking he would be an easier touch than Lois. He was surprisingly enthused. “Oh yes! We’ve missed all the proper Christmassy things the last few years being away. Carols would be lovely. And it might make a nice outing for Ellen. She doesn’t get out much really, one way and another.”  
So now even someone from school was going to be there, thought Esther, a familiar squeeze of nerves gripping her insides. Michael left her raking up dead leaves and went into the house to ask Ellen and, he said, get her some money.

This happened _once_ , Dr Herrick had said, preparing for The Play, a long time ago. This happened once, and never again. She’d heard him say it first to Nicola, then to herself, when Nicola had been rehearsing as the Shepherd Boy, and she’d had to learn the solos. A detached part of her had almost enjoyed the rehearsals - Dr Herrick explained everything in such an interesting way - if it hadn’t been for the overwhelming terror of the end performance drawing close.  
Once Daks was safe and the subsequent row was over, which had been utterly foul, and all her own fault - Miranda, Tim, Lawrie and Nicola all in massive trouble because of _her_ \- while Keith railed on at them and she looked at her shoes and murmured when it was her turn, she’d almost wondered if the row had been _worth_ the relief of not having to sing the solos.  
And then later on, a year later in fact, she’d had to wonder if she would have been able to do them at all. Lawrie, candle angelling beside her, wouldn’t have been any help if her throat had tightened and her breath choked and her voice refused to come out. Sometimes, she thought she would have been all right - occasionally she even indulged in a day dream in which she’d sung them all perfectly well and everyone had been delighted with her - but then -  
But then the crashing reality of the Carol Service intruded once again - the sense of failure as raw as if it had happened only yesterday.

Lois was expecting the evening to be rather a bore. She had deliberately busied herself with a few chores, so that they were running a bit late when they left the house. The main body of the church was full by the time they arrived, and the jolly ladies at the door directed them up to the low balcony at the back. She thought her mother might demur at the stairs, but no, leaning on Michael’s arm, Ellen climbed the steps without grumbling. Having hoped to sit near the back, where she might discreetly glance at her phone from time to time, Lois was privately dismayed to see the three empty seats in the front row that Michael was leading them towards. Ellen settled herself, fussily, pulling the skirts of her coat around her legs, then fiddled endlessly in her handbag to find her fruit pastilles. She offered the tube of sweets to Lois, who refused, then to Michael who accepted one. He was enjoying this, Lois thought irritably, though goodness knows why. It was bound to be tiresomely amateur.

The church was nothing like Wade Minster, thought Esther, finding the lack of mediaeval splendour something of a relief. There wasn’t the weight of centuries bearing down on one. This modern church was as wide as it was long, filled with light, bright wood, and open space. The audience rustled and murmured, shedding layers of gloves and scarfs as their combined warmth took effect in the full church. Carla, the conductor, spoke a few words of welcome. Then she turned back to the choir, waiting in their rows, and stood poised, hand half raised, waiting for the last whispers to subside. At last, the crowd was silent.  
Esther gazed unseeingly across the heads of the lower part of the audience, and then, faces coming into distant focus, realised that she could see Lois, Michael and Mrs Sanger at the front of the balcony, looking over the low railing. At least they couldn’t see her own face too closely from up there, she thought, in an attempt to tamp down the panicky feeling that would rise if she let it ….. Casting back over the blurred, expectant faces in the main body of the church, she caught a sudden glimpse of Pauline’s face. A broad, hopeful smile. Seeing it, she remembered - Pauline saying, with the husk of her broken voice - ‘Your face. Worth looking at. Good in close up.’  
The conductor caught her eye, nodded and dropped her hand. And Esther sang.

At the end of the carol, Ellen nudged Lois, and whispered “She’s a lovely voice, hasn’t she?”  
Lois nodded, and shushed; her mother’s idea of a whisper never as quiet as she thought it was, but to her surprise, she was impressed herself  
It was quite different of course, a deeper, mature voice, not the high, pure, almost ethereal voice that Nicola Marlow had; a human singer, not an angel, but with a tone like honey, like a mother singing a lullaby to her child. Lois snatched at her thoughts - it was stupid to be reminded of Nicola Marlow _now._

That wretched girl. Lois had been dragged into the aftermath of the Christmas Play row - herself and Janice Scott. Keith had grilled them. Why hadn’t they mentioned their suspicions at the time that it was _Nicola_ at the netball match and not Lawrie? What had led them to think it was her? Janice Scott, calm and detached as always, saying that whoever it was had been playing so very well, and of course it was Nicola who was usually _much_ the better player of the two. Lois had jumped in hastily before Janice could say any more, stammering that Lawrie was a very good player too. They couldn’t have said for sure …. There wasn’t always that much difference … Keith gazing at them, tapping her pen thoughtfully, as if about to ask, what the reason was for the better player _not_ being on the team. And then Keith-like, not pulling at that particular thread but contenting herself with a sharp reminder to both of them to take more responsibility in the future. Trouble often arose from people _choosing_ not to take action - establishing which twin was playing that day might have prevented them from thinking they could take the law into their own hands on future occasions. Lois, aggrieved, and Janice, unperturbed, agreed and apologised and were sent on their way.  
If only, if only.  
Surely. it was better for Nicola to have won the Cricket Cup than to have been on the Junior netball team? If she could have been given the choice that’s almost certainly what she would have picked, wouldn’t she?. Some might say it was a sort of karma. Fate had levelled things out, and if anyone had lost out in the end, it was Lois herself. There was no reason for long forgotten things that had happened at school to still prick at her, was there?

A long mild autumn had meant some of the shrubs kept on flowering unseasonably late. But in the last week before Christmas, wind and rain had stripped the remaining hangers-on and the garden was starting to look wintry. Blown leaves piled up in soggy drifts again. Esther was cutting back the fuchsia, which was a brave blaze of colour through the darkening autumn days but threatened every year to completely take over its corner of the garden. She looked up to see Lois picking her way across the wet grass towards her.  
“Good morning,” she said cheerfully. “Bit of a turn in the weather, isn’t it?”  
Lois gave her only a curt ‘morning’ in response.  
“Did your mother enjoy the concert?” asked Esther.  
“I suppose. As much as she enjoys anything these days,” Lois replied.  
The bubble of happiness on which Esther had been floating since the concert was making her temporarily immune to snubs. It was a feeling which she conflated in her mind with the taste of the homemade millionaire’s shortbread that Pauline had brought to share round after the concert - indulgent, delicious, many layers of satisfaction - and the feeling had infused every moment of this last week, through the bad weather, the pre-Christmas traffic jams, the crowded shops through which she struggled before Seb came home for Christmas.  
“We’re planning a spring concert for next year,” said Esther, “If she’d like to come to another one?”  
“Well - maybe,” said Lois shortly. “I wanted to talk about the garden actually. I mean - it’s winter now - and there can’t be that much to do. And Michael’s at a bit of a loose end anyway…”  
“It’s mostly cutting back and tidying at this time of year,” Esther began, and then belatedly realised what Lois was saying. “Oh, I see. Well, that’s fine. I’ll finish up today, then you can call me again in the spring if you need me.”  
“Yes, I think that’s best,” said Lois. She sounded slightly disconcerted. Perhaps, Esther thought, she’d expected her to be more bothered. But she had as much work as she needed anyway, and a well off client who had a very grand house had just asked her to turn her unused conservatory into an indoor garden space, which would be a good project for some spare days in January. She had been fond of this garden, but one couldn’t hold onto things for ever.

Lois went back inside, out of the chill wind, saying that she’d send Michael out with the money to settle up. She looked back out at the figure of Esther working in the garden, energetically cutting away dead wood. Slim even when bundled up in winter clothes, she had a grave kind of beauty that Lois was uneasily aware Michael admired.  
It would be better to look for someone else if they needed help with the garden next year, she thought. It had been a mistake to keep that connection with Kingscote; a link that she had thought she severed forever when she left the place. The memory of that last day there was almost a physical sensation, a sour tasting, curdled feeling of failure.  
She had cauterised that experience, she’d thought, come to terms with the loss of that silly game. It was just a game, like the countless other games she’d supervised during the course of her career as a PE teacher. Some you won, some you lost. She’d been Head of Department before moving abroad - jobs, travel, marriage - a perfectly respectable CV - and now her new path as a teacher of yoga. It was ridiculous to think that one’s life was held in the balance and found wanting because of a minor misunderstanding at school.

But it seemed some old injuries never healed.


End file.
